Mass Maintenance Transaction Availablity

Question: I am fairly new to SAP Security and would like some input to the use of the "MASS" transaction and any subsequent spin off's. As present the business would like the use of MM17 - Material Mass maintenance and i am in discussions if this should be made available to the business. Is this a transaction that should be available for daily use or should it be restricted to anyone in particular. Also what if any are the disadvantages of having this access is data integrity.

Answer:
Mass maintenance transactions are generally OK if assigned to the correct person. Typically a transaction like MASS would be assigned to someone in a business support function (such as Master Data Owner/Superuser) and are used periodically. If they are required on a daily basis then there may be a business process problem.

The main risk is that mass maintenance of anything allows a large number of changes to be made. It only takes one mistake to damage a large amount of master data. This risk can be mitigated a bit by restricting object type via object B_MASSMAIN - this can force users to only update certain data areas e.g. Purchase Orders, Sales Orders etc.